Fabulous Witch (Torrent Witches Cozy Mysteries Book 4)

by Tess Lake

  I started with Cyro Nash and read every single thing about him – his crazy stunts to promote films, the time he’d locked those actresses in a shipping container with rotten meat to get a good performance out of them, the other time he’d left some actors chained up out on a farm overnight. He’d been sued multiple times, but for some reason actors continued working with him and then agreeing to his crazy demands to put them in extreme situations of stress so he could get the best performance out of them. It was during this investigation that I came across all of the pop trash websites that were ninety-nine percent speculation and maybe one percent fact, if that. It didn’t take me long before I was reading the Harlot Bay Times and, oh boy, had Carter gone off the deep end. There was an article about Cyro Nash being in debt to foreign gangsters. There was another about Mattias’s wife Liberty being cut out of the will via a prenup. Given Mattias had seven previous wives and about fifteen children, there was a lot of speculation about who exactly would inherit his fortune. I found some articles featuring blurry photos of Liberty sitting at blackjack tables where it was claimed that she was sometimes gambling two hundred thousand dollars a night until Mattias had cut her off.

  I read through everything I could find, whether it was believable or not, and then went on to investigate Tobin Hemming, the producer, for no other reason than he made me uncomfortable. There weren’t really any pop trash articles about him. He’d started producing films straight out of college, and over the last twenty years he had slowly made his way to the top, always behind the scenes. There were a few oblique references to things like “he knows exactly what he wants and he gets it,” and stuff like that, which was code for “he has a really bad temper and he takes it out on people.” But there was nothing to suggest he was anything other than a standard Hollywood type who was slightly crazy, mostly controlling and just trying to get films made.

  Once I finished all my research, I sat back on the sofa and relaxed, letting all the pieces drift around through my mind.

  Was it possible that Cyro was sabotaging his own film? There was a fair bit of evidence that he’d worked up crazy promotion schemes in the past, feeding the press stories of on-set fights and romances and accidents to get as much attention as possible. He’d certainly played some of the media off against each other, telling different lies to each one and having people who worked for him leak whatever he wanted to the press. Given he’d done stupid and dangerous things like lock people in shipping containers or tie them up on an isolated farm, could he have crossed the line and damaged the brakes on the stunt car? Kaylee’s accident had attracted the paparazzi and more attention. As I stared into nothing, I saw a new article appear on Carter’s website and then a moment later another on top of it. The first was headed “Sabotage on Witch Film” and detailed the sabotage of the scuba tanks.

  The second article was headed “Murder on Set of Witch Film.” I read through it, but it was light on detail. It simply said a crew member had been found dead in a trailer and murder was suspected. That was it.

  I wondered briefly who was feeding Carter the stories and considered that perhaps he was making up stuff from what he’d overheard from cast members.

  The only other suspect I was seriously considering was Liberty herself. If what the junk press had said was true, she’d been cut off, and we had overheard her telling Tyson she needed money or “she would be next.” Had someone murdered Mattias because of something like gambling debts? Or had she done it herself when she’d discovered she’d been cut off entirely?

  “Sawdust man is here,” Adams murmured and then immediately went back to sleep.

  A moment later I heard the crunch of gravel outside, and not long after that Jack was at my front door. The storm was still gusting about, but when I saw him it died down immediately and he looked up at the sky in surprise.

  “Wow, that stopped fast,” he said and then looked back at me. “So I hear this morning it got a little crazy,” he said and stepped towards me with his arms open. I stepped into his embrace and put my head against his chest.

  Chapter 19

  I woke up with Adams’s tail tickling my nose.

  “Mr. Stretchy is gone. He’s been stolen,” Adams said.

  I pushed his tail away from my face and tried to wake up.

  I’d been having a dream about riding in a golden chariot, throwing lightning bolts down on Harlot Bay with both hands. Hopefully not a sign of things to come, although it was a fairly fancy-looking gold chariot.

  “Who is Mr. Stretchy?” I asked Adams as I got out of bed.

  “He’s my friend and now he’s missing because you won’t buy me a security camera,” Adams said.

  “Let’s go have a look for him,” I said, heading to the kitchen.

  It was going on seven and Molly and Luce were still asleep. Since the fake food poisoning fiasco, they’d been getting up later and later and closing Traveler earlier every day. This I knew only from Luce – Molly still wasn’t talking to me. I made myself a coffee as Adams jumped up on the counter and sat there watching me.

  “I want the XP-17 infrared military grade,” he said, tapping a paw on the security camera catalog.

  I slid the catalog out from under his paw and had a look at the price tag.

  “This is sixty-eight thousand dollars! I don’t have that,” I told him.

  “Can I have the Ultra Vision Pro?” Adams asked.

  I flipped pages until I came to the Ultra Vision Pro. Eight thousand.

  “I don’t have eight thousand dollars.”

  As I drank my coffee and woke up, Adams kept pitching for which spy camera he wanted me to buy him, gradually heading down in price. Pretty soon we were at the back of the catalog in the cheapest section, where the cameras were little more than glorified baby monitors.

  “These are all still really expensive,” I told him.

  Adams got a crafty look on his face.

  “What if you don’t give me my pocket money for six months?” he asked.

  “You don’t get pocket money!”

  Adams pondered this for all of half a second before he looked up at me, his eyes gleaming.

  “Can you start paying me pocket money?” he asked.

  I grabbed the catalog, folded it in half and stuffed it inside my bag that was sitting on the kitchen counter.

  “I’ll have a look later today, and maybe if I find something, then maybe I’ll think about buying it, no promises.”

  “I hope something you love doesn’t go missing,” Adams said and stormed away.

  I had a quick breakfast and shower, gave Adams a small piece of cheese by way of apology, which he happily ate, and then headed out to my office. I’d received a message from the set while I was asleep saying there would be no filming today while the police completed their investigation. You would think that someone being strangled to death on a film set would pretty much shut it down, but you’d be wrong. Tyson being found dead in the trailer that had belonged to Mattias, who had also possibly been murdered, only warranted a single day off for the police to investigate the scene and then filming was to resume tomorrow. That was also the day that our scenes and Aunt Cass’s were due to be filmed.

  The sky grumbled to itself as I drove into town, no doubt due to the slight butterflies in my stomach at the idea of being filmed. Where was Jack Bishop when I needed him?

  Of course, I knew where Jack Bishop was when I needed him – he was working on one of the other sets today, trying to get it completed for the final week of filming. Last night when he’d come over, we’d had dinner and not talked about much in particular at all. It was divinely calming. Then he’d kissed me goodnight and headed back to his own house. Although I’d wanted him to stay, the truth was I’d seen him almost every night for a few weeks now. There was something kind of nice about sleeping in my own bed by myself again, although it wasn’t that nice that I wanted to make a habit out of it.

  I opened up the office and went up the stairs ,half-expecting to find Au
nt Cass sitting back in her chair with her feet up on the desk, but the office was empty. There had obviously been some movement on the chili sauce front. Many of the boxes were now gone and there was just a row left along the side wall. I had a quick look, but I didn’t want to get too close. The boxes were covered in warnings, and honestly some of them looked so old that they could have been from the Cold War. There were a few boxes that had hieroglyphics on them and some that were covered in Russian writing, and what I’m fairly sure was a biohazard symbol.

  Since I pretty much had the day off, I wasn’t entirely sure why I’d bothered to come into the office except for some general feeling that I should. I sat down in the chair, adjusted it to suit me, and fired up my old laptop, which took a good five minutes to get going. As it warmed up, I could almost feel my own thoughts walking around in my head. The storm above me had me off balance, out of control, a victim of my slip witch powers. I was trying to report on a film and yet I’d been pulled from place to place without really wanting to be. Sure, I had followed Tyson, but then I’d been dragged along in Aunt Cass’s wake as she’d broken into the house and found all of Mattias’s stolen property. I’d been pulled into interviews with people who had far more power than me, and seen things I couldn’t ask any questions about.

  The more I thought about it, the angrier I got. Wasn’t I a journalist? Did it matter that the Harlot Bay Reader wasn’t doing so well? That had nothing to do with whether I was an actual real journalist. And if I was a journalist, it was time to do some investigating.

  I pulled a piece of paper out of my desk and grabbed my favorite pen to write a list.

  Figure out who’s sabotaging the film and killing people!

  Find out who killed Mattias.

  Fix Molly’s love life.

  Make Mattias move on.

  End this slip witch storm power.

  Help Adams with his “stolen” food. (I’m sure if I bought a video camera, it would show him sleeping or something, though.)

  I looked the list up and down a few times and then at the bottom in big letters wrote BE HAPPY.

  That last one might not be able to be solved fast, but by the goddess I was going to work on it! I went through the list again to figure out what I could do right now or as soon as possible. I settled on Adams and his stolen food. I pulled the spy gear catalog out of my bag and started looking through it again. I had to head to pretty much the end of the catalog, where the cameras were starting to get into my price range, to find something I might be able to afford. I was comparing two camera models, thinking about where exactly I’d set up a spy camera, when a thought crackled across my brain like lightning thrown from the sky.

  Someone is sabotaging the set! We need to put up hidden cameras!

  This was very shortly followed by the thought that my boyfriend, Jack Bishop, had worked as a private investigator in the past. Maybe there was a chance he had some experience with setting up spy cameras.

  “Hey, Harlow, what’s up?” Jack said when he answered the phone.

  “Do you own any spy cameras? You know, those pinhole ones?”

  I heard Jack murmur something to someone and then the sound of footsteps as he obviously walked away from where anyone could hear him.

  “I do. I have a whole lot at home.”

  “I think we need to—” I began.

  “Put them up all over the set,” Jack said, finishing my sentence.

  “Do you think it will work?” I asked.

  “We saw that guy sabotaging the scuba gear, and that was entirely by chance. I can easily put up a few cameras around the place, especially with me working on the sets. I’ve got a break later today, so I’ll go home and grab them and see what I can do.”

  “Excellent! I’ll talk to you later!” I said. As I was hanging up, I heard Jack say something to me that sounded suspiciously like love you.

  I stood there with a dead phone in my hand and then shook my head. Nah, he couldn’t have said that, could he?

  I looked down at my list again and put an asterisk next to Figure out who’s sabotaging the film and killing people. If Jack put up some small cameras around the set, perhaps we’d have some luck and discover who was the saboteur.

  I was looking at which camera I could afford to buy for Adams (it might have to wait a little bit until I had some money) when I heard the sound of two girls yelling from downstairs. There was a loud bang as something, probably a body, crashed against the front door. I rushed over to the window and looked down into the street to see two beautiful young blonde girls fighting in front of the office. One had the other in a pretty good headlock, but that girl wasn’t taking it lying down. She was punching the other one in the kidney and yelling for her to let her go. As I watched, I saw two older women come rushing across the street. Mothers, clearly. It looked like they were about to break up the fight, but then they started shouting at each other, and for a second there I thought they might start punching.

  Oh, Jonas, what have you done? This little bit of morning entertainment was put to a stop when Sheriff Hardy pulled up in his car and leapt out. He didn’t have to say a word before the two girls had separated and come to stand next to their mothers, as meek and quiet as a mouse. I saw Sheriff Hardy give everyone a stern talking-to and then he waved his arms at them. It worked – they scattered, running back to their respective cars and driving away. It was then that Sheriff Hardy looked up and gave me a nod. I waved to him and then saw he was coming into the office.

  I had the tiniest moment of brief panic as I looked at Aunt Cass’s chili boxes stacked up against the wall and realized there was probably something illegal in them. But what could I do? I wasn’t game to try a concealment spell given how weak I was last time I did it. If it turned out that Aunt Cass had bought a whole heap of illegal stuff, well, she would have to deal with it.

  Sheriff Hardy, always polite, knocked on the door before letting himself in.

  “That boy down there needs to pick a girl and settle down before there’s an open riot in the street,” Sheriff Hardy said, nodding his head back downstairs towards Jonas’s office.

  “I think he underestimated how dedicated Harlot Bay’s mothers are to getting their daughters married off.”

  I waved him in, and he came and took a seat on the sofa. I sat down at my desk and we looked at each other for a moment before he cleared his throat and started talking.

  “We were investigating the murder scene today, and I do call it a murder because it appears that he was strangled to death, and I wondered if, as you have been working on the set, you had any extra information you might want to tell me, off the record,” Sheriff Hardy said.

  Ah, time to play one of my favorite games. The “he knows something is going on but can’t say it out loud” game.

  I knew there was no way I could tell him that Aunt Cass and I had followed Tyson to his home and then broken into it and then stolen back all of Mattias’s possessions.

  At that thought, I felt a sudden cold jolt through me. At the back of the office was a cardboard box with the top sitting open. Stashed inside was all the stuff we had retrieved from Tyson’s house. There was Mattias’s script, a whole bunch of his clothes and personal effects, and even some of his costumes from the movie. I forced myself not to even glance at it lest Sheriff Hardy looked that way and became interested. While I couldn’t tell him that we had broken into the deceased’s house a day earlier, I could tell him about the relationship between Tyson and Liberty and claim I’d seen it on set.

  “Mattias Matterhorn’s wife, Liberty, she was sleeping with Tyson,” I began.

  I made up a story – okay, I lied – and said that I’d seen Liberty and Tyson together in Mattias’s trailer. I then mentioned that I’d overheard them talking about someone named Peter but said I didn’t know what it was about. I hadn’t planned to say much more, but Sheriff Hardy kept nodding and looking at me, so for some reason I let it slip that I’d overheard Liberty seeming very concerned about money and s
aying that if she didn’t get some soon, “they” could be out to get her or she could be next.

  Once I’d said that, I managed to keep my mouth shut. If I kept talking to Sheriff Hardy, I was sure it wouldn’t be long before I’d be confessing that I was a witch.

  “Well, thank you for that. Some very useful information,” Sheriff Hardy said, standing up.

  I stood up too. “Is that all? You don’t have anything to tell me?” I said.

  “Am I telling you as a journalist or as the niece of the beautiful woman I am dating or as someone who seems to be deeply mixed up in all kinds of strange affairs?” Sheriff Hardy said, albeit with a twinkle in his eye.

  “You think Aunt Ro is beautiful? Do you love her?” I teased.

  “Of course she’s beautiful,” Sheriff Hardy said, letting the second question slide right by. He smiled at me, and right then I decided that if he was going to end up my uncle by marriage, then that would be pretty good. He was a good and honest man – although that wasn’t going to get me and my cousins and the rest of the family to hold back from mercilessly teasing him at every single opportunity.

  “Okay, I have some information for you which we’re going to release shortly anyway, but you can have it ahead of time so you can write an article if you like,” Sheriff Hardy said. “Mattias Matterhorn was poisoned. It appears he was given something that would cause a heart attack, but not only that – we discovered that someone had replaced his heart pills with placebos. It appears that this had been done quite some time ago, as there were no traces in his body of his heart medication. Someone had been trying to give him a heart attack for some time, and my hypothesis would be that after they’d failed, they went down the path of poisoning him instead.”

  “Any suspects?” I asked, feeling my head spin somewhat. Although there had been a lot of sabotage on set and clearly someone was trying to shut down the film, I guess there had been some part of me that had been hoping Mattias had simply died of natural causes, that he hadn’t been murdered. To find out someone had poisoned him was quite shocking.